Stirring the Skin
by La Guera
Summary: Flack told Mac he'd have to think about turning over the memo book that could bring down his own, and so he did.  Set during Consequences.


Disclaimer: All recognizable characters, places, and events herein are the property of Anthony Zuiker, Jerry Bruckheimer, CBS, and Alliance-Atlantis. No infringement is intended, and no profit is being made. For entertainment only.

**Spoilers for all episodes in all seasons until 309. Major spoilers for "Consequences".**

**A/N: **Canonfic Flackgen. Will wonders never cease? Contains references to my fics, "Going Under" and "Field of Dreams". A Flack sibling is my own conjecture.

He had told Mac he would have to think about it, and so he did. All through lunch at Geno's Deli, he thought about late April and the drug raid that had put him on the promotion grid, and the taste of the coffee he had been drinking when Mac had approached on the street to ask for his notes on the case clung to his tongue and the roof of his mouth like scorched paving tar. It was so thick that he could scarcely taste his pastrami on rye with 'slaw, and he chewed it without relish and swallowed it in soggy, tasteless hunks.

It was the last thing he had been expecting. The bust was old news, had been closed since July, when the dealer and his mules and track-marked skels had all gone up on charges of drug trafficking and felony possession with intent to distribute. The dealer had tried to negotiate his way into a lighter sentence by rolling on his clients, and fuck knew if that had gone anywhere. All he knew was that he and his boys had caught the bastards dead to rights with fifty kilos of black cocaine and the attendant paraphernalia for street distribution. End of story. He and his boys had done their jobs and gotten the scumbags off the street, and then they had passed the baton to the D.A., and even that incompetent, ass-kissing limp-dick had managed to convict them based on their solid work. Everybody had come out looking good, and he had moved on to other cases. There had been no reason to do anything else.

Except now Mac was telling him that there was.

The thought nagged at him, tugged at his mind the way the ugly, wattled scar tissue sometimes tugged at his abdomen if he ran too hard or twisted his torso just right, sudden, insistent, and irritating as hell. As though his consideration had prodded it into wakefulness, his stomach gave a hot, prickling twinge, and he grimaced. He set down his partially eaten sandwich and slipped a hand beneath the table to knead at the roughened skin that ran from just above his navel on the right to just behind his right hip, a slow, ginger exploration of three probing fingers that expanded in ever-widening circles. It had become a habit since his discharge from the hospital, when there had been no coyly flirting nurses to chide him or distract him with tantalizing vision of cleavage as they leaned over his bed under the pretense of checking his vitals or plumping his pillows. The doctors had told him to leave it alone and let healing take its course, but he couldn't help it. He'd even awakened in the night to find himself stirring the deadened flesh with dreamy, mechanical fingers.

He tried not to do it at the precinct, which was full of sharp eyes and loose lips. The only thing faster than the spread of department gossip was the damage it could do, and there were already too many eyes on him these days. He could feel their weight on the nape of his neck and tingling in his armpits and calves like sweat. They were watching him for signs of weakness, waiting for him to stumble or sway on his feet or go white around the eyes in the grips of a cramp. They wanted proof that the golden child with a world-class NYPD pedigree had feet of brass, after all. So when the urge overtook him at the precinct, most of the time, he busied his hands with the tasks of transcribing his case notes or filling out his DD-5s with a ballpoint pen.

But there were times when the compulsion was irresistible, and on those occasions, he did his best to camouflage it by pretending to stretch his lower back by doing sidebends in his chair or scratching an itch. The first week back on the job, he had spent more time in the john, rubbing his wounded gut, than in the field. God knew what the rest of the bullpen had thought of his frequent and protracted visits to the bathroom. Probably assumed he was either puking or shitting his brains out. The more cynical ones might have figured he was dosing up on Vicodin to get through his shift and pretend that nothing had changed because of that Sunday morning when the world had temporarily winked out for him as he lay beneath a pile of rubble and a thick layer of swirling dust that could have been-fuck, should have been-his shroud.

_But that _was _what you were doin', _Gavin pointed out relentlessly inside his head. _At least a first. The first week you were back in the saddle, you were so tired and pukey that you wished you hadn't flushed your pain pills down the crapper in a fit of macho point-makin'. You came into the bathroom and splashed water on your face and told yourself that the pain wasn't that bad, that you could do this if you'd just quit bein' a fuckin' pansy. You'd press your sweatin' palms to the counter and breathe in shallow gasps until the hot knife quit twistin' in your guts and slippin' into your balls like shards of cold, broken glass. When it was really bad, you closed your eyes and cried like a pussy, and then you felt like an asshole for it._

_Now that you're safe at your post, you can admit that you shoulda waited another month, maybe even two, but back then all you wanted was to forget that May 10, 2006 ever fuckin' happened. You wanted to prove that Lessin' hadn't gotten the best of you, that you weren't some damaged sadsack who was content to lick your wounds and collect a disability check. And to get your old man off your ass and outta the back of your mind._

_He showed up twice at the hospital after the lights came back on, and after that your ma made excuses for him like she always does. Damned if he didn't set up camp in your mind and over your shoulder, though. You saw him with every sit-up, and his face only got sharper with every one you almost couldn't do. He turned up in the darkness of your room while you stared at the ceiling in the dim glow of the low-watt, fluorescent light mounted in an alcove above your hospital bed. He never said a word, just loomed in the corner in the dress blues he wore to Christmas Mass and the funerals of his fellow officers. He followed you home and stood by the laundry hamper in the corner of the bedroom, stared at you with wooden, unflinchin' eyes, lips as white as his gloves pressed into a thin, grim line. Sometimes, you pulled the covers over your head so you wouldn't have to see, but it never worked because you could feel his gaze. Just like you can feel the gazes of the other cops as you walk through the squadroom or hunch over your computer keyboard._

_It's not like he had to say anything, though, is it? You knew why he was there and what he wanted. He was tellin' you to suck it up and get up off your ass, tellin' you to get back into the thin, blue line and uphold the badge you wear and the legacy behind it. You owed it to every cop who'd ever holstered up, but especially him. He hadn't busted his ass for twenty-five years and earned the title of NYPD legend so you could disgrace him by bein' a miserable, disappointin' pantywaste. You'd already done that enough._

His father's voice echoed in his head, a low, gruff rumble that registered in his stomach beneath his kneading fingers. _You've done enough, boy, _it said, and in his mind's eye, he saw himself at sixteen, white-faced and gaunt with grief and asking if he could carry his sister's coffin on his shoulder. _You've done enough, boy. _Spit from his mouth like bile and stinging as a slap.

He had lost his father's respect the night his sister died and forfeited his acknowledgement that night as he stood at the kitchen table in his socks and boxers and begged to do right by her for once, but those losses had never translated to an easing of the burden he was expected to carry. In fact, they had only doubled it. If he couldn't be a decent son and brother, then he damn sure better be a damn good cop.

_You joined the academy because you thought you'd regain his respect when you gained a badge. After all, badges were a mark of honor to everybody with a decent bone in their body. You figured out that much when you were a kid, holdin' your father's hand and watchin' people pay him courtesy by lowerin' their eyes or straighten' up when they passed him on the street. Bein' a cop meant you were one'a the good guys, and if you had that piece of copper and brass pinned to your chest, then he'd have to see you as somethin' more than the pissant waste of squirt that had gotten his baby sister killed by takin' her someplace you had no business bein'._

_But that ain't the way it worked. You graduated near the top of your class and stood in formation with your chest puffed out so your parents could see the gleam of polished brass where the Commissioner had pinned it to your uniform. And it didn't change a fuckin' thing. Your ma was clappin' and cryin' and snappin' pictures, but your Pop was expressionless, eyes turned inward, probably lookin' back on the time when he'd stood in that formation. He clapped twice and dropped his hands, and you knew then that it was no good. All that came with the badge you wore was the burden of upholdin' the law and an addiction that sank deep into your veins._

_And the family legacy, of course. _

_You accepted the first two without hesitation. The first had come the second you signed your name on the application form with clammy fingers, and the second would introduce itself three days after you got assigned to your precinct and made your first collar. The sound of those cuffs clickin' home on that violent drunk sent an electric jolt up your spine. It was proof that you were makin' a difference, that you'd made the right choice even if it had been for the wrong reasons, and you sat in the passenger seat of the patrol unit with a boner hard as diamonds strainin' the crotch of your uniform pants. And yeah, I noticed, but just between you and me kid, you ain't alone. A good collar is better than screwin' sometimes._

_You knew you were goin' to take some shit for bein' a blue legacy; all the badge babies did. What you weren't expectin' was the crushin' weight of it. Maybe you should have since your old man was a fuckin' PD legend, but back then, you were naïve enough to think that pedigrees didn't count for shit when you got down to it, that when push came to shove, it was whether or not you could walk the walk that mattered._

_On the streets, that was true. The skels and perverts you busted didn't give a flyin' fuck who your old man was or had been. The only thing they gave a shit about was whether or not you had the balls and the guts to bring them down. They punched you in the face and bit your fingers and aimed for your nuts in skirmishes. Sometimes they blooded you, but most'a the time, you muscled 'em up and into the back of the unit. You proved that you were stronger, and in a perverse way, they respected you even while they told you that when they got out, they'd fuck your mother and your sister and your elderly grandma. You never told them that two of the three were dead._

_The precinct was a different matter, though. As much as it carried the grit and stink of the streets in its floors and nicotine-stained walls and saw their truths paraded past the booking desk and holding cells on the hollow faces of hookers, druggies, and human punchin' bags, it existed in a web of seedy gossip and vicious jockeyin' for position. The brass was busy coverin' its ass and kissin' those of lobbyists and PR rats, and the old cops were holdin' on to their fadin' glory with gnarled hands and bared, yellow teeth. The middle-of-the-roaders were doin' their best to climb the ladder instead of plummetin' down the rungs to join the hairbags, who were just in the line to collect a check and a pension and maybe a bit of desperate pussy from a teenage runaway tryin' to wriggle out of a solicitation or possession charge. The rookies were just tryin' to wipe the shitstains from their Jockeys and dry the wetness behind their ears. Some of them made it, but a lot of them didn't._

_You joined the food chain at twenty-one, and from the day you buttoned up your uniform shirt, they've been watchin' you and waitin' to see if you're gonna fall flat on your ass. You just wanted to be one of the guys, just another face in the crop of new recruits, but your old man's name preceded you. Your first day on the job, Captain Gerrard, who was Lieutenant Gerrard back then, clapped you on the shoulder, declared you a chip off the old block, and announced that he knew you'd make the department and your old man proud. You smiled and nodded and said _yes, sir, _but inside, you wanted to die because you felt the target painted on your back in blood._

_Your fellow rookies assumed you were an arrogant dick who thought you were better than them, and they rode you hard. You came in from the field to find dogshit on your locker more than once, and it was a long time before you got invited to Sullivan's for beers after shift and didn't sniff your guinness for signs of piss. They called you _Junior_ and _Wonderkid _and sneered when they said it, and the house gopher usually forgot your doughnut order when he made a run._

_Gerrard wasn't much better. He was always lookin' over your log notes and arrest reports. Maybe he was tryin' to look out for you and do what he thought was a favor to his old partner and occasional drinkin' buddy, but the cynical part of you suspected he was searchin for mistakes, seekin' out the smallest typo so that he could cluck disapprovingly and shake his head and say you weren't like your old man, after all, and how disappointin'. _

_Sometimes, you were tempted to throw in the towel and go to culinary school. Some of the best memories of your life were of standin' in your Aunt Lucia's kitchen and watchin' her cook. The woman worked magic with a saucepan, a knife, and a wooden spoon. She even looked witchy, with her dark eyes and long, black hair thin as spidersilk that trailed down her narrow back. It was laced with silver, and beautiful. Sometimes, she lifted you up so that you could help her stir, and when she set you on your feet again, she tapped the side of her nose and winked as if to share a private joke. The best part was that you always got the first spoonful of the magic in her pot. It made you feel special and important, and you coulda lived that life if the cancer hadn't eaten her alive by the time you were twelve, and if your blood hadn't run blue._

_If there's one thing that you can't forgive your old man for, it ain't that he stopped lovin' you the day your sister's heart stilled inside her chest. You deserve that. It's that he soured the only redemption you could choose, tainted it with his stranglin' shadow like he had every childhood memory. You couldn't take a step without steppin' into the afterglow of his limelight, and it burned like lye on your skin and diminished the gleam of your badge. His was the real deal; yours was just the shoddy hand-me-down of a pretender._

_It was a rough road there for a while, until you decided you didn't give a shit what your dad's old cronies and the other pissant rookies thought. Once you got that under your skin, it was all right. Better than all right. It was fuckin' _good. _There wasn't a doubt in your mind that the uniform was your second skin. You lived it and breathed it and gave yourself to the addiction without lookin' back. Sure, your decision carried a price-most of your girlfriends didn't stay around after the luster of bonin' a cop wore off and the reality of livin' in the shadow of the badge set in-but you could live with that because the choice to carry the badge was finally yours, and yours alone._

_The fact that most of your father's buddies had been shuffled out of the department to draw their pensions and admire the cement panoramas afforded by the view from their fire escapes by your second year helped ease the situation, too, but mostly, it was your balls and your guts and your instincts. You could smell stink on a perp before he opened his mouth, and nine times outta ten, you were right. Some of the guys around the stationhouse started callin' you Nostradamus when they saw you, and that was better than _Wonderkid. _As a matter of fact, it was A-fuckin-A._

_The brass warmed up to you, too. After all, your track record made them look good, got their balls high and tight inside their fancy uniform pants and let them gladhand the public and local politicians with tales of the fine tradition and deep roots of the PD. They could point to you and your father and claim that "their" institution bred excellence. You were a good get for them, someone they could point to as a shining example of the majority of the force when the shit got too thick and the public demanded to know why cops were crammin' a floor lamp up a suspect's ass. _

_But you don't give a shit about the brass as long as they keep their noses outta your trough and their asses down at One Police Plaza. You pay Gerrard the respect due him as your captain and get on with the job. Frankly, Gerrard has wised up; somewhere along the way, he recognized you as your own man. You know he did because he stopped callin' you _Junior_ and stopped mentionin' how proud your old man would be whenever you made a big collar. Now, you're just _Flack_ to him, a bright kid who's on his way up because he's a good cop and not because half your DNA comes from the right drop of jizz._

_Your old man ain't never gonna be completely separate from your life behind the badge, though. He still lives in that world ten years after it expelled him from its ranks with a gold-plated Glock and his badge mounted inside a black-velvet shadowbox. There are plaques with his name etched into them hangin' on the precinct walls, and when you give in to your filial guilt and turn up to Christmas dinner for your ma's sake, he's sittin' at the table in his dress blues, and all he wants to talk about is the job and your latest case. _

_You don't want to tell him, but you do because it's easier, and because the house has known too much silence. He listens and grunts and bludgeons you with unsolicited advice that carries with it the pungent whiff of paternal condescension and the singsong refrain of "When I Was on the Force." You just nod and chew food you can't taste and wait for it to be over, and then you go home and take a shower and coax your food to stay inside your burnin', crampin' stomach with liberal applications of Pepto. Most times it works, but sometimes it doesn't, and on those nights, you hover over the john and puke your guts. That reminds you of the months after Diana's death, so you close your eyes, rest your head on the cool plastic of the toilet seat, and tell you father to go fuck himself._

Now that he thought about it, that was probably why he had refused to turn over his memo book when Mac had asked. Sure, Mac had ambushed him on the street like some perp that needed to be worked and tacitly accused him of either masterminding or covering up a drug ring within his squad, but what had galled, had nearly made him spit the words "Fuck you" into Mac's self-righteous face like bile had been the sheer fucking presumptuousness of it. He had looked so much like his father in that moment, stern and smug and brimming with his sense of moral superiority-no, fuck that; moral goddamn infallibility. It had been the way his father looked when he had done wrong as a kid, right before the ass-whipping.

_Fuck you, Mac, _he thought savagely, and the hand rubbing his scar increased its tempo, though he was unaware of it. _Fuck you. _It was an oddly liberating thought, and he would have said it aloud hadn't a kid been peering at him from the next booth over, one small finger lodged firmly in his nostril and his other hand tugging vigorously at the crotch of his jeans. He waved at the boy, who promptly turned and sank into his seat again.

_Fuck you. _It was not the sort of heartwarming sentiment he'd expected to harbor toward the man who had gift-wrapped the rest of his life for him with a ribbon of dirty shoelace, and part of him was ashamed, but he could neither help nor deny it. It was there, a hot, burning ember beneath his massaging hand that refused to be extinguished by guilt or notions of gratitude. Mac had a way of spending gratitude before he could earn interest on the principle.

_Fuck spendin' it, _Gavin grunted inside his head. _Motherfucker tried to trade on it out there, to manipulate you into implicatin' one of your guys in a murder and possible kidnappin' and givin' him more gratitude while you were at it._

I'm askin' as a friend, _he said, but it wasn't hard to read between the lines. It was in his eyes and the way he lorded over you like you were some boot-lickin' punk who needed to kiss his ass to clean his nose. He was cashin' in the currency he earned that Sunday in May, and he was sellin' it cheap. Your life was worth a tenuous, bullshit connection to a closed drug bust the week before Lessin' rearranged your world. Son of a bitch. _

And that was the bitch of it. He was not naïve enough to think that every cop was a choir boy, but most of them were good guys doing their best to scrub the festering asshole of this city while living on ramen noodles and good intentions, and his boys were as clean as a newborn's conscience. They had to be. He had kicked in doors with those guys a thousand goddamn times, charged into hole-in-the-wall dives with their guns pointed at his back. If they were rotten, he would have smelled it, sensed it like he sensed dirt on a perp or a potential informant. But there was nothing. Just copper and gun oil and the yeast of beers raised after hours at Sullivan's in the astigmatic light of last call.

_What about Gavin? _demanded a cold, clipped voice that reminded him of Mac in the throes of interrogation. _You were his partner for almost two years and his friend for a lot longer than that, and you never saw it in him, either. You'd sat to dinner at his table with his wife and daughters and shared his food at his home, and you thought you knew all his secrets, but you had no idea about Hector or Anita until Stella turned up with the DNA results. Seven years in his company, and you had no idea that the family man who kissed his wife and bounced his twin daughters on his knees had made another family with a young girl in the projects._

_You were his rookie for two years. You trained under him and worshipped at his feet, and if I had asked you about his character, you would've sworn to me on your shield that he was without sin. You would've sworn your career and your reputation on it that he would sooner die than let a dirtbag go free, but he almost did, Don. He tampered with the evidence-a dying declaration-to protect his son. If you didn't realize that your mentor was capable of such an act, then how can you say with any certainty what the officers working alongside you would or wouldn't do?_

He shifted in his booth, and the fingers kneading his abdomen sped up to keep pace with his thoughts. He grimaced. Mac might have saved his life by rooting around in his exposed guts like Mr. fucking Fixit, but he had no right to poke around in his brain and settle over it like a lesion. He was tired of hearing Mac's voice. It had filled his ears in the first hazy hours after the bombing, had been the totality of his world, the voice of God beckoning him from the deep, and he wanted it to stop, to let him taste and breathe and fucking _hear_ the noises he had forgotten in his long sleep.

_But he's got a point, Don. _Stella now, and he wryly wondered how many of the Nerd Squad had taken advantage of his weakness to slip into his fractured hall of mirrors. Stella wasn't so bad; Stella was good people, and thank God it was not Danny Messer. Danny would never let him hear the end of it if he ever stumbled across the hidden room where his fever dreams were stored.

_Naw, he doesn't, Stel, _he insisted fiercely, and took a sip of cold coffee to wash down the crust of his sandwich. _Gavin was different. He wasn't hurtin' anybody, linin' his pockets with blow money or shootin' innocent kids in the streets to protect his dirty little secret. He was just lookin' out for his son. A million other fathers on the force woulda done the same thing. _

_He pissed on the badge_, his father grunted. _He woulda let that poor bastard's doer walk just to cover his kid's ass, the snot-nosed punk. And his, too. Let's not forget about that. Wouldn't go over too good with the brass and the boys at the stationhouse if they found out there was a murderer hangin' from the undocumented branch of the Moran family tree. Not to mention the shitstorm news of his Serta soiree would raise at home with the fuckin' Rockwells. Wouldn't want Andrea to know hers wasn't the only cherry he'd been pickin'._

_You'd know all about embarrassin' family secrets, wouldn't you, Pop? _he thought bitterly as he picked up his pickle spear and took a bite. The brine filled his mouth, vinegar and gall, and he chewed with perverse relish. _That's been my job since Diana-to let you down and piss you off for havin' the stones to want my own shoes instead of to fill yours. You fuckin' live to point out my mistakes and piss into every cut and scrape I take on the job._

_Oh, but you're so fuckin' quick to step up for some credit when I get some due. Indifferent as the statuary on Mount Pleasant Cemetery when I graduated from the Academy, and you couldn't be bothered to show up to the hospital more than twice after Dr. Singh told you I wasn't gonna do you the decency of dyin', but you sure as hell found the time to turn out for that dumbass ceremony where they gave me a plaque and a pat on the back for dodgin' the bullet. You showed up in blues that haven't fit in ten years and made sure to get your face in every picture and tell the photographers that I was your boy. Still didn't touch me, though, did you? Not once. And you never called me "son."_

The whole thing had been a fucking joke. His mother had been over the moon, of course, had taken enough pictures to carpet the living room and wallpaper the den, but he had wanted no part of it. He had taken the wooden plaque because it had been expected of him, but he hadn't wanted it. It had been diseased and heavy in his hands, and he had been sure he could feel dust from the blown-out building on his fingers. He had swallowed bile and nodded in dumb thanks when the Commissioner had saluted and shaken his hand, but he had never smiled. The picture in the paper the day after the ceremony and the ones his mother sent a few days later bore this out. His lips had been a thin, fishbelly line, and his eyes had been pinched and hollow. When his mother had broached the subject later, he'd told her that he had been sick. It hadn't been a lie.

He hadn't kept the pictures. Not a single one. He'd stared at the one in the paper-drab and grainy and peopled with strangers-until his eyes had burned, and then he'd thrown it into the recycling bin without reading the article. The ones from his mother he had kept longer, because he loved her and she had obviously meant them as a maternal tribute, but there had been too much of his father in them, and looking at them had made his stomach hurt. His first impulse had been to burn them in the oven, but the thought of his father's ashes in his mouth every time he ate had been unbearable, and so he had taken them to the building's boiler room and fed them into the furnace one by one with cold hands.

He had stood in the dark in his socks and boxers and Yankees sweatshirt and fed them into the sooty, iron mouth of the furnace and watched his father's face curl and blacken as the Devil chewed him up and swallowed him. His own face had changed, too, broadened and bloomed jowls like goiters and wrinkles that had deepened with each passing second. It had become his father's face, and then the Devil had eaten him, too. He had tossed in the last photo with tears drying on his face in a clear, porcelain glaze and the furtive squeaks of rats in his ears like tinny, echoing screams, and then he had gone upstairs, thrown away his clothes, and huddled beneath a shower hot enough to scald until he could scrub the memories of dust and old wool from his skin. He had stood there until the water turned cold and spread the ache of his still-mending belly into the rest of him, and then he had slept naked atop the covers and let the sticky, New York summer warm him again.

The plaque he had shoved into the furthest reaches of his bedroom closet, facedown so he would not have to see his name etched in silver on black like some fancy, granite grave marker.

He wondered whether the Commissioner would think he was such a credit to the uniform once the thin, blue line around him crumbled like old brickwork and released the cockroaches into the light. Maybe they would ask him to return that nasty plaque.

His hand was rubbing so furiously at his scar beneath the table that said table was shuddering with the force of the motion, and a passing waitress spared him a wary glance as she delivered coffee to a balding businessman two booths behind him. It dawned on him that she probably thought he was some pervert, jerking off under the table while some kid ate his scrambled eggs. He hastily withdrew his hand from his side and placed it on the table with what he hoped was a charming smile. She didn't return it, and he couldn't blame her. Too often, a smile was the precursor to a savage, killing bite. He dropped his gaze and stared into the mustard smear on his empty plate.

_Is that what you're worried about? What the brass will think of you? _Mac again, contemptuous and brimming with moral superiority.

He decided that Mac could go fuck himself with his Jiminy Cricket routine. It wasn't about the brass and never had been. It was about family, the one he had lost and the one he stood to lose if Mac's hunch was wrong. Not his old man, who he'd lost a long time ago, but his mother, who was proud of him, and his dead sister, who'd thought he hung the moon once upon a time. It was about Truby and Scagnetti and all the other guys who strapped it on in that locker room every day. It was about the heart that beat beneath the badge, and how easily it could be broken.

If Mac was right, then a scumbag was off the streets, but if he wasn't, then he could never go home again, not really. Oh, his desk would still be in the bullpen, and he'd still have his badge, but the ranks would close, and he'd be left out in the cold. No more invitations for beer after shift, no more invites to weddings and birthday parties for the kids, and no more silent welcome when he stepped into the locker room. Just cold, indifferent eyes and the reputation of a sackless kiss-ass willing to sell them out to look good to Mac Taylor. He'd be the family disappointment all over again.

Not like Mac knew anything about family. He was a one-man show, a three-star fucking general in his castle of glass and steel, and the Nerd Squad were his toy soldiers, fodder for his ego. He'd proven with Aiden that he'd let his guys take a bullet to save the reputation of _his _lab, and he could still remember Danny's anger as he'd sat across from him in Sullivan's the night Aiden got fired and cursed Mac with his booze-heavy tongue and torn him apart with his wildly gesticulating hands.

"Fuckin' Mac," Danny'd slurred, and swayed earnestly over his fourth pint. "He doesn't give a fuck about any of us. He's all about number one. He'll sell us all down the river, you mark my words." He'd thumped the table for emphasis hard enough to make his pint glass wobble in a graceful, belling circle.

At the time, he'd chalked it up to booze and Danny's lovingly nurtured sense of melodrama, maybe the festering memories of the Minhas shooting, but now he knew better. Danny was usually more perceptive than people gave him credit for, and when it came to Mac, he had been absolutely right.

_Mea culpa, Danno, _he thought as he raised his finger to signal for the check. _Mea fuckin' culpa._

He wondered if Mac was going to help him explain this to the victims, the people whose nightmares would be relived once word got out that the cop who had arrested their boogeyman might be one himself. He doubted it. Mac was so busy with his evidence and breathing the rarefied air of his divine temple of science that he wouldn't bother. He'd hide behind his lab reports and leave him to the dirty, human task of knocking on doors and reopening badly-healed wounds. He'd be the one perched awkwardly on the edge of the couch while some rape victim who still slept in her running shoes sobbed and asked him how this could have happened, hadn't they got the fucker dead to rights? He'd have to crouch in front of molested children and explain to them that the man who'd hurt them might get out of jail because there had been another monster in their house that day, and their wide, wet eyes would remind him of Little Red Riding Hood. _My, Officer Friendly, what big teeth you have._

An image arose in his mind of him and Truby responding to a possible homicide four years ago. They'd both been detectives for less than two years, and when they'd turned up, guns drawn and voices booming with adrenaline, they'd found a woman dead on the living room floor, skirt hiked above her thighs and her pantyhose crammed into her mouth. No sign of the doer, but Truby'd heard a noise in the back bedroom, and so they'd gone to investigate.

The vic's seven-year-old daughter had been hiding under the bed, shivering and silent. All he'd seen of her at first had been her eyes in the darkness of underbed, huge and terrified, and when he'd reached for her, she'd screamed like a snared rabbit and scuttled to the far side of the bed, stuffed frog throttled in the crook of a small arm. It had been Truby who'd coaxed her out, brown-panted ass poking over the edge of the bed as he'd shown her his badge and promised her that they were here to protect her from the bad man.

He had no idea what had convinced her. Maybe it had been the shiny brightness of the badge-she had still been young enough to believe that only the good guys had beautiful things-or maybe it had been the softness of Truby's voice. He'd had a son of his own by then, and fatherhood had gentled his swagger. In any case, she'd shot out from under the bed and clambered into his arms, a spider with her unsuspecting frog. There'd been blood on her hands and smeared on her knees. Testing had proven it to be her mother's. The science could never explain when it had gotten there, but he'd always believed that she'd tried to wake her mother up before hiding under the bed.

It was Truby she'd stayed with at the stationhouse while they'd waited for the advocate from children's services, doodling aimlessly on his memo book with his pen and a few broken crayons scrounged from the desk sergeant. It was him she'd told when the story came out, reciting the story of her mother's murder while he hunkered improbably on a plastic chair meant for someone one-third his age.

Turned out it was the doorman who'd killed her mother. He and the vic had had a one-night stand that had apparently meant more than that to he of the pillbox hat, and when the mother had told him to hit the bricks, he'd hit her in the head with a heavy, brass table lamp instead. Ten times, and then he'd helped himself to her defenseless body and left her to die. Little Red Riding Hood hadn't seen it all, but she had seen enough to identify the wolf, too damn much, and her statements to Truby, along with the evidence gathered by the Nerd Squad, had sent Mr. Doorman to Sing Sing for life.

Little Red had gone into state custody, but she'd never forgotten Truby, the brave woodsman who'd hunted down the wolf, stuffed his belly with stones, and sent him down the river to die. She sent Christmas cards every year, and he, Flack, could always tell when one had arrived because it would be displayed on Truby's desk beside the framed photos of his wife and kids. Little Red thought Dean Truby hung the moon and kept away the darkness with the golden glow of his badge. So how was he supposed to tell her that the man she thought her hero was nothing but a wolf inside the pressed skins of dead sheep? He wasn't sure he could.

_You won't have to, _Gavin reassured him. _Your boys are clean. Taylor's just fishin', and he ain't gonna find squat._

_What if he does? _His mind turned relentlessly to the two minutes the team had been out of his sight while he'd searched the kitchen, two minutes that had apparently meant everything.

_There's no proof it was Truby. It coulda been Jack or one'a the zit-faced uniforms._

Like either option was any better. Jack was as fearless as a bull terrier and had pursued cases detectives with less patience and more sense had passed to the cold file in the back of the evidence room, where crimes yellowed with age and were forgotten. Jack caught the people who fell through the cracks after their tragedies were pushed aside by prettier faces. And the uniforms… The idea that new recruits used their badges as bulletproof vests and pussy magnets made his stomach cramp, and his hand slipped beneath the table to knead pocked and knurled flesh.

_You could just tell Mac to go fuck himself, _whispered a sibilant, reptilian voice from deep within his mind. _Make him get a subpoena and wash your hands of the whole mess. Nobody can fault you for turnin' it over with some judge standin' on your neck. Then it's just the bureaucracy versus the footsoldiers, same old fuckin' same old. Mac gets his prize, and you don't lose your place at the family table._

_Or, _said the voice, and it dropped in the register until it was basso profundo, conscience through a mouthful of swamp mud, _you can go into the evidence locker and write a little revisionist history. Better yet, get the memo book and drop it down a sewer grate. _Departmental fuckup, Mac, sorry 'bout that. You know how the paperwork goes. _Mac'll be pissed, but so fuckin' what? He'll catch the scent of fresh blood soon enough, and all the scumbags your guys hauled in will stay right where they belong. Little Red Ridin' Hood can keep her hero and her peace of mind. Whoever killed the paintballer'll skate clean, but it's the good of the many that matters, isn't it?_

He thought of the dead paintballer's mother, then, a tiny, Asian woman whose eyes had laughed once upon a time. He thought of her sitting on the couch while he and Mac delivered the news of her son's death. The words had struck her like blows, and she'd twisted away from them, pushed herself into the sofa cushions as though they could protect her from the truth. Mac had stared at the wall while she wailed, and he had tried to look her in the eye while she screamed denial into his face and demanded that he take it back. He'd felt like a son of a bitch; he always did when he had to tear someone's life apart, and the only thing that had gotten him out of her apartment that would be forever minus one had been his promise that he'd find the waste of skin who'd stolen her son. He'd meant it, and if that meant giving up the memo book, then so be it.

The waitress brought his check, and when he shifted his hip to retrieve his wallet from his back pocket, the nasal miner from the next booth called out, "Look, mommy, a policeman!"

Flack blinked, and then he realized that his badge was visible. The kid stared at it in rapt amazement, egg smeared in one corner of his mouth.

"Is it real?" he asked breathlessly, as if he were face to face with Superman and not an exhausted homicide detective with too many wounds and too much conscience.

Flack suddenly remembered that once upon a time, he had looked at his old man the same way, as though the feat of holding the weight of the world on his shoulders was nothing at all. He wondered if his old man had ever felt like he was drowning. Or like a spear was buried in his side, hot and gnawing as broken glass.

_I know where my conscience is, _he thought. _Where my memories are. They're all right here underneath my hand. _He pressed his fingers to the knobbled ridge of scar tissue.

He tossed a rumpled twenty onto the table and slid from the booth. "Yeah, it is."

"Cool!"

_No, it isn't, _he thought. _Not today. Today it's too damn heavy._

He managed a tired smile for the kid and his mother, and then he slipped out of the diner with his hand pressed to his aching side to keep the memories inside. Mac was wrong, had to be, but he'd request the memo book anyway. Just in case. It was his job.


End file.
